Now I just feel lost.
Creative Staff:
Story: Fred Van Lente
Art: Maurizio Rosenzweig
What They Say:
To pull off the highest-stakes heist in history, Jericho Way—a Resurrectionist known as the Maker who’s been awakened to the knowledge and abilities of all of his past lives—must team up with the woman who helped ruin his current life: his ex-wife Adele. Way and the Scout need her skills, which means she needs to be unlocked. But will millennia after millennia of skills be enough to free their crew from the clutches of the evil Sojourn Corporation?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Resurrectionists shifts to being a digital exclusive with this installment and in some ways that feels like it should be a bit freeing for the work in that it can do and explore things a bit more without having certain constraints on it. Not that Dark Horse puts much in the way of constraints on its creators with their original works as they want them to really explore things. I’ve enjoyed the Resurrectionists series over its first few issues, particularly with its flashback sequences to Tao and the past, but also because of the artwork and the way it has a really great style to it when the coloring applied to it that elevates it in a really great way. While I’ve found that a re-read or two definitely helps with each issue, this issue has left me feeling pretty lost in a way as things are just getting more jumbled and complicated.
Part of it is this sense that you really need to be reading it continuously in order to really pull the pieces together, mostly because of the fact that there are multiple lives at work here and because we do get instances where characters aren’t even named for awhile within the book, making it harder to keep up overall. While we get two of our leading ladies here going through their aspects of their relationship, and some of the inherent distrust that’s bubbling under the surface because of how easily one has turned on Way, it’s very easy to forget who is who here at the start because there’s not bridging or connective material from the previous issue to reconnect the reader to the book. I’m not in favor of huge exposition or anything, but the way it’s written simply feels like it’s written to be read as a large grouping of issues in a trade as opposed to the more “complicated” monthly reading most people do.
The rest of the book has a similar feeling in a way as we get a new job being set up in order to steal the dolls that Sojourn is after and we see how Mac and Way have come up with a fairly creative plan in order to do it. especially since it throws off a lot of people with the overall trick of it all. That gets dealt with decently across it, but the main appeal for me here is that through a bit of violence, we end up seeing Maya getting unlocked and revealing to her all of her past lives. That brings a really strong surge of understanding, as is often the case, and getting a look at some of her past lives and abilities is definitely intriguing with what it may offer to the book as a whole. Her level of violence goes up quite a bit from there once she has all this experience back, and there’s a lot to like in seeing how she takes on a wholly different tone from there that should make her a lot more engaging of a player going forward.
In Summary:
While I like the series overall with what it’s doing and the kind of layering to it, there’s some structural presentation pieces that leaves me feeling very out of sorts with the book each month. Some are easier to dig into and clear up than others, particularly when it focuses on Tao/Way in either past or present, but when it focuses on the other characters it seems to play it as though the reader is aware of a good deal of it already or has just read all of the prior issues just before reading the latest one. Which can work great in trade form, but it makes the book a hard read when new installments come out and you wonder why you’re still reading it. It’s not bad in the sense that a re-read or two reveals more and more, but there just feels like there’s a high barrier to entry with the book that’s getting higher with each installment because of the way the cast is becoming more and more complicated.
Grade: C
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: March 11th, 2015
MSRP: $3.50
